So the Second Circuit has spoken: Donald Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll $5m, and his claim of presidential immunity is rejected like a bad cheque at a casino. The ruling, delivered not with a bang but a whimper of judicial finality, confirms what any student of Roman history could have told you: that power, when left unchecked, eventually meets its check.
But let us not confuse this with some grand moral victory. This is merely a footnote in the long, slow decline of American institutions, a decline that began long before Trump and will outlast him. The court’s decision is correct, yes, but it is also a symptom of a deeper rot: a legal system that has become a theatre of the absurd, where the most powerful man in the world is haggled over like a vendor in a bazaar.
The real story here is not Trump’s liability; it is the intellectual decadence that allows us to treat a former president as a common litigant while the empire burns. We compare Trump to Caesar, but Caesar never faced civil suits over sexual assault; he simply crossed the Rubicon. Today, we cross nothing but legal briefs.
The verdict is a victory for rule of law, but the law itself has become a hollow ritual, a shadow of the robust civic religion it once was. And so we applaud this small justice while Rome smoulders.
